Planet.osm is the OpenStreetMap data in one file: all the nodes, ways and relations that make up our map. A new version is released every week. It's a big file (on 2017-10-26, the plain OSM XML variant takes over 846 GB when uncompressed from the 60.7 GB bzip2-compressed or 37.4GB PBF-compressed downloaded data file).

There are also files called Extracts which contain OpenStreetMap Data for individual continents, countries, and metropolitan areas.

Format

The two main formats used are PBF or bzip2-compressed OSM XML. PBF (Protocol Buffer Format) is a compact binary format that is smaller to download and much faster to process and should be used when possible. Most common tools using OSM data support PBF.

Downloading

See below for usage instructions.

Planet.osm mirrors

For security reasons, consider using HTTPS sources if available, rather than HTTP or FTP. Some Internet users may experience problems with IPv4-only sources when their Internet access (notably mobile accesses) offers native routing only though IPv6, and where IPv4 is only supported by their ISP using temporary NAT sessions via proxies (which may not be reliable for very large file downloads, even if HTTPS is used).

Mirrors are encouraged to support connections from IPv6, and to support secured protocols to reliably authenticate their sources (encryption is not required as the data is published, so this should not be a performance issue on servers, but this requires installing server-side certificates and renew them regularly before they expire). The support of RSYNC on these sources is also useful to allow fast incremental synchronization to other local mirrors, and it should be secured as well. Some mirrors also support peer-to-peer delivery with BitTorrent protocol.

All files also come with a .md5 signature file. Use it to check your downloads (especially when using FTP: using RSYNC or Torrent will generaly avoid download issues such as truncated files) ! You should first check for the existence of the .md5 file before trying to download actual data (which may sometimes be in a transient state while a mirror is being synchronized with a recent dump). Also make sure your browser or downloader client supports the transfer of large files over 2 GB, as well as your local OS and file system for storing such files.

archive.org/details/osmdata (Internet Archive, available under various items: you will lose time browsing every icon to find what you are looking for! Select the list view instead, and enable details below titles to see dates of initial publication instead of date of last synchronization)

Original source

Update frequency

A new version of planet.osm is released weekly (currently every Wednesday morning). We have these, going back to the start of April 2006.

The size of a planet.osm file is about can be seen in the header information on the planet download page. Planet files are very large (tens of GBs) so please check the size before starting to download.

The weekly dump normally starts at around 01:10am UK time on Monday morning and is guaranteed to contain all updates prior to that time. The dump is constructed from a database dump using conversion software, and the result should ensure referential integrity. Please note that this doesn't always apply to extracts - see Planet.osm/FAQ. The dump and conversion normally takes around 48 hours to complete, in total, and the result is usually ready on Wednesday morning.

Note: The timestamp of the file is recorded in it like this : <osm version="0.6" generator="OpenStreetMap planet.c" (...) timestamp="2013-01-02T01:10:14Z"> it will be useful to decide what "diffs" to use if you want them :

Additionally we offer regular diffs. These are produced daily (under the 'daily' subdirectory) and more recently we also offer hourly diffs and minutely diffs. These have been produced with Osmosis and can be used to reconstruct the full dataset (see examples at OSM Wiki pages Osmosis and osmupdate). Since these only contain the differences, they are much smaller files; A daily diff is generally about 40 MB compressed. For more information please see Planet.osm/diffs

Unpacking .bz2 files

Osmosis and osm2pgsql allow you to use the files in bz2-compressed form. If you need to unpack it from bz2 format, use 7-zip on Windows; on Linux just type bzip2 -d planet.osm.bz2; or your OS may support double-click unpacking. See Wikipedia's list of compression programs.

If you are handling the compression yourself with libbzip2, then note that the files are compressed with pbzip2 and contain multiple streams that need to be handled as described in section 3.4.8 of the bzip2 documentation.

During download, the network will be your bottleneck. Once you have the file you will need to unpack it, and then disk I/O will be your bottleneck. Or you can work with the bzip'ed file, but then the CPU will be your bottleneck. If you have sufficient space to unpack the full planet file, you can save a lot of time and disk thrashing by unpacking it on the fly while downloading it: try curl -L https://planet.openstreetmap.org/planet_latest.osm.bz2 | pbzip2 -cd >planet_latest.osm.

In most cases, using import tools supporting the PBF format will be a faster and more efficient solution, they can be processed directly without unpacking it to plain OSM XML format and PBF-compressed OSM files are always smaller than bzip2-compressed OSM files and faster to download.

Additional technical notes

wget: Alternatively to curl, wget -O - may be used. Due to the size of the planet files, older distributions of wget may fail to work since they may not support file sizes larger than 2 GiB, and attempting to download files larger than that will report a negative file size and fail.

pbzip2: may be replaced by the single-threaded bzip2 -cd / bzcat as well.

Refences

Missing nodes

Note that planet download have ways that reference nodes that are not in the same file.

Due to performance reasons it isn't possibly to get a fully consistent snapshot of the database. Although the dump is run in a transaction, the isolation level required for a "snapshot"-style dump dramatically increases the running time. You might find that, if you have been editing while the export has been running, that the way may be in there but the nodes are not. You can take a planet file and apply the daily diffs using Osmosis to create a consistent planet file (however you may still have some problems with old bad data in OpenStreetMap from before the introduction of the API 0.6).

country extracts

Country extract may have ways that reference nodes that are not in the same file.

This is perfectly normal depending on the settings used in the extraction process. There are two options; either the ways at the boundary have been truncated (such as in the GeoFabrik downloads), or the nodes are just missed out and the ways are left as is (for example the CloudMade downloads).

Handling missing references

This really depends on what you are doing with the data. You can either drop the node references or you can go to another data source, such as the API, to fetch the missing nodes.